American third parties and electoral success

Whichever way you slice it, it's still a two party system

I briefly got excited while the local news was on during a recent visit to New York (this is vaguely related to Trump's trial) when someone from an organisation called the Working Families Party popped up to say that this was a great day for seeing that justice was done, etc. Who was this organisation? Was it a new electoral force from outside the Democrat and Republican hegemony that somehow I had missed hearing about? Not really. Not sure if that is a disappointing answer as far as A Level Politics students are concerned. But it did give me cause to update my notes on third parties in the USA.

Plus, there is always the fact that at some stage in each presidential election cycle there is speculation about the possible impact of 3P candidates - see here, for example.

Context: barriers to third party (3P) advancement in the USA

The reasons for the two party hegemony are well worn, and go something like this:

• Historical: there has always been a fairly straightforward binary battle
• Social: the resistance to socialism explains the absence of third party candidates from the left
• Political: the lack of ideological space and the (relatively) broad based nature of the two main parties
• Electoral: the system of fptp and the electoral college (which is like fptp on steroids) tends to mitigate against third parties
• Money: the importance of (including the problem of federal matching funds)
• Ballot access: extremely difficult, and I would argue the most important barrier
• Media: who are only really interested in winners

Facts/data

First of all to what extent do the Democrats and Republicans dominate? What we should bear in mind is that the last person to break the two party stranglehold and take the White House as a third party candidate was Lincoln in 1860. If we drill down, this picture is pretty much replicated at all layers of government in the USA. The Democrats and Republicans occupy most of the governor’s mansions, occupy almost all of the seats in the 50 state legislatures, city councils, mayors' offices and so forth. You can more or less take it as given that your local dog catcher (or the other half a million or so elected office in the United States), if there via the ballot box, is there under a Democrat or Republican banner.

Aside from the two main parties, what support exists among the public? The USA is not a card carrying, membership based arrangement (unlike systems in the UK and the rest of Europe) so it is not easy to make comparisons. A rough and ready metric is voter registration, and only three parties make it over to the 100,000 mark: the Libertarians, the Green Party, and the Constitution Party.

In electoral terms, the most obvious place to start is success at presidential elections. The classic example is Perot in 1992 as the most successful 3P presidential candidate in recent years, taking just under 20% of the vote. BUT he failed to pick up any electoral college votes.

10 most 'successful' 3P candidates* by % of national vote

Candidate Party Year %vote ECV

Teddy Roosevelt Bull Moose 1912 27.4 88

Ross Perot Reform 1992 18.9 0

Robert La Follette Progressive 1924 16.6 13

George Wallace AIP 1968 13.5 46

Ross Perot Reform 1996 8.4 0

John Anderson Ind/Unity 1980 6.6 0

Eugene Debbs Socialist 1912 6.0 0

Eugene Debbs Socialist 1920 3.4 0

Gary Johnson Libertarian 3.3 0

Allan Benson Socialist 1916 3.2 0

* For ease of use, first name on ballot only

In terms of Congress, the picture on Capitol Hill is better or bleaker, depending on your perspective. In the US Senate there are three 'independents' in office. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is, of course, the longest serving, and most prominent of those. In addition, we have Angus King of Maine, and elected in 2018 by the state of Arizona, is Kyrsten Senema. So, on the surface, with 3% of the second chamber's membership listed as being from outside the bipartisan stranglehold, it appears that the barriers to 3P success are more surmountable when we move away for the race for the White House. But, the reality is, all three are de facto Democrats - having either been elected under party banner, or voting with them in the chamber. Before, we move on, it is suffice to say that there are no independents among the 435 House members.

At sub-national level, is the picture any different? Yes, but not much. There are over 7,000 assembly office holders/in state legislatures (which are generally bicameral and so mirror the House/Senate set up that exists in DC) across the USA, and currently only 16 are counted as non-Democrats or Republicans. This works out at approximately 0.002%, by the way.

And when we drill down deeper, to the over half a million other elected offices, i.e. mostly at local level, in the United States, the picture doesn't alter a great deal. I have taken the Greens as an example, largely because their website is updated more regularly than for the other two parties with relatively large support cited above, and across the whole of the United States, just 117 individuals are listed as holding office. Job titles range from 'Member, Soil and Water Conservation Board' to 'Board of Directors, Fair Oaks Water District, Division 4'. And if you like numbers, this means that only 0.0002% of elected office holders are Greens - hardly, therefore, the springboard for success to a higher level.

So what? Measured purely in terms of getting candidates elected under a third party banner, there isn't a great deal we can point to as a victory. But as far as the influence of 3Ps goes, the picture is more complex. That, however, may be an area for another blog entry.